I worked on a year long project to rebuild our payments system only to learn the company had been undergoing talks and was acquired by a different payment system competitor. Even though the pending acquisition was going on for the last 6 months of the project nobody told us to stop working on this thing that the top level people knew would never be used.
Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
481–490 of 794 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#482I wrote a bespoke scheme interpreter, then a virtual machine, a bytecode serialization format and a fun standard library. All in C. Totally useless for real work, not unique in any way, but really fun and great for learning. Sometimes useless shit is the best.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#483Earlier quoted context omitted.
Linode is super cheap. I pay 6 or 7 bucks a month for a bottom tier VM.
I guess I just haven't done anything outside of a PaaS before and I'm a bit worried about unknown unknowns. I'm sure I'm probably up to the task but managing my own server is just new ground for me. I'll have to research how to ensure that the server is always up or recovers from an unexpected failure and restarts immediately.
You can also split the difference and run Dokku[0] on a vps and basically host your own instance of “Heroku”. It can even use the same build packs and procfiles.
Feel free to message me and I’d be happy to help with server stuff.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#484Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the vendor gleefully assured us that they were experienced with "migrations of this scale" Sales is mostly just lying to collect a commission check.
> Sales is mostly just lying to collect a commission check. Depends on the type of sales. A pretty good indicator is how many times a customer makes a purchase from the same salesperson. If it's just one purchase (like ERP consulting) it could be grifty/etc like in this case. If they're buying from the same guy for years, there's often very different types of salespeople. I used to think all salespeople fit the sketc…
When you are working with the same sales people multiple times, it is an instance of treated prisoners dilemma. Used car salesman is just one time prisoners dilemma.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#485Worked 5 years as a contractor for a system made to be used for all of the healthcare in a country. Payed by tax payer money. Some serious money. I never understood what the system actually was supposed to do during those 5 years. Started as some custom authorization server for new healthcare laws and then ended up as some kind of desktop app that had a launcher to launch apps. No idea what the purpose really was and heard it got cancelled a couple of years after i left.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#486This is old, but my most pointless project: The CEO wanted a screen in every hall that showed the company "EnGUAGEment meter". Users would have to go to the app, choose from 10 or so canned messages like "Feeling productive", "Ready to conquer the day", and other such HR speak the CEO (or rather the HR committee he put on the important business of picking the list) felt was motivational. This would update a page that…
Oh my god, it isn't the same product but I was the user of a similar thing at an old job I had for 2 years only it was a slider from 1-10. I always chose 1 no matter how productive, happy or driven I felt. I remember that HR called me in because of this and in a round-about way said I can't just keep doing that as it was bringing the whole purpose of the system down. If I didn't want to interact with the system then…
A couple of the places I have worked at they would hire an outside firm to conduct these type of surveys and they would anonymize the feedback. I saw the reports provided to some of the managers and the feedback in certain areas was clearly unvarnished. Now whether it lead to any meaningful change, that’s hard to quantify. I guess if you did them multiple times per year for several years you could start to establish a trend.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#487Paid by the irish government to learn fortran 77 to upgrade a mainframe era storm drain program so that it could "compete" with the simplest demo that came with a COTS windows solution - because they couldn't sole source something. There were bugs in it older than me.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#488A few years back, I was assigned to a new team and had to run some analysis on a selection of hardware that kept failing quality checks. Was told this was of the utmost importance to the product and that a future production push hinged on solving this problem. I was given a week. The scope of work would entail at least one really late night into the project.
On Day 5 of 7 (sleepless night happened on Day 2 and 3), a passing engineer from a different team stopped by my desk to chat. Saw my screen and said "neat Python code, what's it all for?"
I replied, "oh it's to do some number crunching on that quality problem."
To which he blandly goes: "Oh. Didn't you hear? We scrapped that entire product line 3 weeks ago."
Reader, I almost actually threw my keyboard off the desk.
(If there was ever an argument for in-office work, it's coworkers telling you to STOP working on something and rescuing you from situations like this...)
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#489Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm in small and medium business. A lot of homegrown and unique processes that are just dandy. I mean it they're fine. But when faced by things like standard GAAP accounting processes, or even EDI. You can't argue with it. You can't tell walmart oh no well actually I didn't mean to send that 850. It costs you money. You can't willy nilly charge credit cards anymore. Its just life. It makes it hard for them not just i…
I work specifically with small and medium businesses too, and can echo that sentiment! I'd love to know more about what you do. Love working with SMBs but don't know a lot of other people in that space.
Its nice. It's certainly not high faluting as a lot of HN jobs but I make good money for where I live, our clients are mostly regional but a lot of the 50 states have customers over the years. Mostly we work on implementing and servicing ERP systems. Our differentiator is our skillet in integrations and holistic problem solving. Since the ERP sits in the middle of almost every IT venn diagram, we run into new tech on a weekly basis.
Besides the ERP consulting bit we sell niche solutions in our product space. Mostly comms(EDI, ecommerce,etc) or payroll/bookkeeping addons.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#490Earlier quoted context omitted.
I manage a team of Consultants at a small ERP firm focused on mostly manufacturing and distribution the #1 cause of failure is summed up greatly by Isaiah Bollinger, paraphrasing "most bad implementations are because people are trying to buck the system they bought, rather than work with it, understand how your ERP, eCommerce or other system does a workflow and match it. There's billions of dollars going in and out o…
I've noticed that the same applies to any large inflexible platform, such as the public clouds. If you do things the "native" way in Azure or AWS, you'll be fine, just like millions of other customers. If you try and make the cloud work like your old data centre platform, then you'll have a bad time. I just watched a customer spend $2M to deploy software routers to replace the "bad" cloud-native routers. Now everythi…
I usually ask, is it a differentiator for our business to run X?